Re: BIOS back to Text Only by default

On 10/19/24 15:36, Warner Losh wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> A while ago, I removed GZIP and BZIP2 support from the boot loader by
> default to get it to fit into the space available for BIOS booting with the
> lua interpreter for PXE booting.
> 
> This made it into the 13.4 Release. Some downstream distributions started
> needing to build their own loader for this release. Their MFS setup relied
> on either gzip or bzip2 files working and my changes broke that.
> 
> After talking with people at places like EuroBSDcon, irc and Discord, I
> think I'll take Mark Johnson's idea of moving back to a Text-only boot
> loader for BIOS by default, and putting these two options back into the
> loader.  When we do this, the loader shrinks 20k net (-40k for graphical
> loader, +20k for decompression).
> 
> My thoughts are that you can boot either with the graphical or text-only
> loader. There's no real functional difference, apart from aesthetics. While
> they are nice to have, when space is tight, we should bias towards keeping
> functional things over keeping things that are just pretty when we need to
> make a choice.
> 
> EFI booting remains unchanged.
> 
> I'd like to get this in over the next week or so. I'm soliciting comments
> on this idea. I've created https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47203 for this
> change. I've not regenerated the options docs yet, but I'll do that as well.
> 
> Comments?

I think this is the right tradeoff.

-- 
John Baldwin